In March of 2010 I did a residency at the Vermont Studio Center, and during that residency I drew random walks across the landscape, using my hiking GPS to record my path. It took me a while, but I finally got those random walks saved as image files to post here.
For this particular piece, I started with a full mile, headed in a random direction. I then grafted that mile in Google Earth, placing it so that it would be easily accessible to the VCS. After that, I created nine more walks each a mile long, each broken up into an increasing number of segments. Each segment would head off from the previous segment at a random angle, creating a random pathway across the landscape.
Once these paths were created in Google Earth, I downloaded them into my GPS. I then proceeded to walk those paths, or at least as close as one can when one has to contend with hills, roads, rotten snow, logs, trees, and early-spring college-age disc golfers. Because each walked path meandered back and forth across the “perfect” path, each walked path was longer than the perfect path by up to ten percent. You can see the fractal nature of the walks I took in each image. The perfect path is white, and the walked path is green.
The first few paths had very long segments, so their thumbnails will display at a smaller scale than the later paths. The tenth path actually stayed pretty much within bounds of the Johnson State College campus, while the first path headed out northeast across the snowy forest.
